


Ariadne's Limbo

by Chaerring



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, In her head, M/M, Multi, Post Movie, au-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-14
Updated: 2011-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 07:59:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaerring/pseuds/Chaerring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world she had built around herself was more than she thought she could ever dream of. It would have been easy to recreate her world....to fool herself into thinking she was awake....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ariadne's Limbo

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing of Inception or the Greek Myths.

Ariadne knew better than to think it was real. The world she had built around herself was more than she thought she could ever dream of. It would have been easy to recreate her world....to fool herself into thinking she was awake....Easy to forget the little gold bishop and how it’s hollowness lifted it off her hand and sent it floating into the air while she dreamed.

She couldn’t do that though. She refused to fool herself.

Instead she filled her world with a twisted maze of traps, corridor upon corridor of any design she could imagine. She left a string trailing behind her so she could always follow her imaginings back chronologically to the entrance. Towards the center of her maze she could feel herself growing tired and she could no longer think of new ways to manipulate her space. She had exhausted her possibilities for the time being, so she fell back on basics and felt it was appropriate for her name and occupation to finish her design exactly like a Grecian labyrinth.

Ariadne left the center of her maze open. A dais, almost, with a cream chaise and a gauzy canopy for her to rest on and wait. A column that the bishop floated over so she could keep an eye on it....and then she rested. She rested for a long time until she felt her hair grow long and her skin begin to wrinkle. She didn’t like that, they might not recognize her if she aged and she had to be recognized to be rescued.

She didn’t know how much time had passed above or below.

She let her hair stay long and her body grown as she would have been in a decade above, but erased her wrinkles, kept only enough to give way some of her experiences, not her rapidly growing mental age. Her clothing no longer suited her, so she made more of the light colorless fabric and let it blow around her as her curtains did.

Eventually, she grew weak. She had locked her subconscious out of her mind, scared of her own shades and what they might become. What she might turn them into accidentally by spending time with them in limbo.

After so long, though, she was lonely, and she came up with a solution to her problem. If she could make them seem enough like her friends to comfort her, but fantastical enough for her not to ever believe they were real....She reached out with her mind and drew them to her. Eames and Arthur, both so handsome in their own ways and she would have to ruin them to keep them.

Arthur was first, and Eames’ opinions were a great help. Ariadne knew it was her own mind she conversed with, but it made her less lonely anyway. First, she rucked his hair with her hands, and carefully pulled antlers from his hair to rise into the sky. She brushed her thumbs over his eyelids and his impossibly dark eyes lost their whites turning black all the way through. His clothing was what she loathed to mess up. His seemingly neat dress, with uniquely matched components, things that weren’t from sets, but still worked when he combined them, was so quintessentially Arthur that she didn’t want to change it. She knew she had to if she was going to keep him though. The vest, the tie, the shirt it all disappeared and she carefully tore his trousers. He was disheveled and unnatural, but his lips still quirked the correct way and she couldn’t help but whisper at him.

“Quick, gimme a kiss.”

He smiles, but only presses a finger to her lips and turns her to face Eames.

Eames is easier. Ariadne isn’t sure if that’s because he’s so changeable to begin with, or simply because she’s not sure she knows him as well as she liked to think she knows Arthur, though she really didn’t know either of them. When she’s finished his teeth are even more of a jagged mess than usual and his pants mirror Arthur’s torn and jagged. He has horns rather than antlers and she’s painted a maze across his tanned skin, rather than changing his eyes.

When she’s done she goes back to her chaise to sit and look at them. They smile and snark in tones not quite their own and she nods, satisfied and no longer feeling an ache in her chest. She had created her own minotaurs to keep her company.

She just hoped they would cast themselves as Theseus in the world above.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aware that a lot (most) of my references to the Greek myth of the Labyrinth and Theseus and the Minotaur are 'incorrect' when directly taken back to it's plot and characters, I simply wanted to twist the roles around. Ariadne saved Theseus with the spool of yarn, the Minotaur was the monster...I liked the idea of changing it up.


End file.
